Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Down to Business

When I saw this article by the not-so-gently self-promoting Robert Sullivan, I thought, “Lo, here there is fodder.” And of course I was right.

Sullivan advocates—mildly, reasonably, in the passionless, careerist way of the Times—setting the Brooklyn Bridge walkway aside for pedestrians and installing well-protected bike lanes one the main level.

If he'd stopped there, I just would've given the closest thing this fledgling blog can give to a high five (namely, a link) and gotten on with my day. I've driven a car and a moving van over the Brooklyn Bridge at rush hour and can't see any reason not to take a strip of it away from the Angry Parkers who apparently enjoy congregating there.

Then I got to this paragraph

If we bicyclists cede the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, then it might be a step toward winning the public’s respect. Then, just maybe, pedestrians would call a truce and recognize that their real enemy is the car, that bikers are like pedestrians in that they are just trying to get to work without the use of a gurney.

And I thought: bullshit. The “real enemy” of humans on bicycles isn't “the car,” it's all the people (humans on bicycles included) who see the street as some territory where the standard rules of civilization don't apply. Or, put differently, the idiots.

But before I can get that thought down in the prissy manner of this blog, Bike Snob NYC has to go and say the same thing better than I possibly could. He even uses it as a pretext for sticking little pins in rollerblading, something I've dearly wanted to do for a while now.